The Holy Trough

We turn on the holographic projector that we nicked from Admiral Ackbar in the confusion of the Endor post-victory Orgy (so many furries!) to display the Strange Planet whose charting is our cultural rover’s ultimate purpose. We gloss over catalogues of artefacts and genealogies of sound.

We identify a disturbance in the force, a void in our cartography. A mountainous and wild zone where we have in the past sent envoys well versed in the arts of diplomacy, dance and arm-wrestling, and that’s all she wrote.

As Artificially Intelligent as these minions are, they are not the best at dealing with unexpected scenarios and fuzzy categories. Those things that cannot be said clearly, you see, they have trouble parsing those things: The mysterious, the sexual, the deadly, the irrational.

Which means that, this time, we need to do the job ourselves. We download our consciousness into a baseline body and infiltrate the uncharted zone, guided by pigmy scouts with pointy teeth and pointier spears. They were raised in the pummelling gospel of drum music, they could come in handy.

Zoom in.

Picture us playing a sandpit first person shooter in a level concepted by Andrei Tarkovski, implemented by James Cameron and fucked up by China Mieville (in other words, Avatar done right). Playing it on legendary, rocking those checkpoints.

To begin with, a culturally complex discotheque whose atmosphere renders the trajectory of drum-beats visible, and their sound distorted in a way that optimises their feverish dance allure.

We lost the pigmies in this Martin Reverie.

Then, down the bottom of a cliff from where the pop tribes hurl their misfit spawn. Mutant magic wolf children who whistle the sweet melodies of utopia while surviving a night to night which is red in tooth and claw.

We slugged for jesus in this quagmire. We ran out of ammo. The cracking of our guns and the drone of our knife missiles fed into the never-ending musical composition which is the ambient of this place.

We arrive at a clearing illuminated by the last embers of a dying bonfire, stalked by presences big and lumbering like spillage from a Maurice Sendak nightmare.

Are these leviathans on the prowl, imperial dreadnoughts, godly ectoplasms or riotous inmates at the EBM asylum?

We cannot see, but we can hear. Their bellowing and sirens, oscillations and chanting mark the steps of Peepholes’ geometric progression. A curve which bounds this weird region where we are now trapped, its psycho-geography an embodiment of all we look for in music = Myth & Trance.

This is also the point when we realise that we are never coming back home, for this is home.

Peepholes are perhaps the best band in the UK right now, together with Factory Floor & Cold Pumas (NB we are waiting for Teeth of the Sea & Mazes’ new album, and Vision Fortune’s debut). The Overspill!, is being released by Upset the Rhythm in November. It is incredible. You can pre-order it here.